LONDON 1953

At 2 Carlton Gardens, MI6’s Section Y took up residence in a subdivided former ballroom and lounge, in which royalty, celebrities and the wealthy had once danced, chatted and lolled through pleasant afternoons and evenings. Still resplendent with crystal chandeliers and exquisite plasterwork, the room now overflowed with fluent Russian speakers, from White Russian émigrés to British merchants who had fled St Petersburg after the revolution and Polish army officers unable to return to their occupied homeland. With such a motley crew of operatives at work on demanding and tedious translations that required total concentration, it is hardly surprising that the office atmosphere was sometimes fraught. The dry heat of the London summer was a daily aggravation. There were inevitable disagreements, frayed tempers, verbal scuffles and occasional tears. Yet Tom Gimson, a former commanding officer of the Irish Guards, managed this huge operation with a potent mixture of strict discipline, encouragement and understanding.

His staff transcribed a relentless succession of tapes filled with recorded telephone conversations from the three Vienna tunnels. The written records were passed to Russian-speaking army and air force officers for evaluation, and the more important items of intelligence then extracted, summarised and passed to the Foreign Office and War Office.

In the summer of 1953 an MI6 ‘celebrity’ was assigned to help Gimson. His name was George Blake.

This was Blake’s first job since his return to the UK that April in a blaze of publicity as one of six British civilians captured by the Communist North Koreans in June 1950 when they overran Seoul. Blake had borne the title of vice-consul at the British legation in Seoul as cover for his MI6 duties, and was returned to the UK, alongside other British officials, by the Royal Air Force.

Blake was born in Rotterdam, Holland, in 1922 of a Dutch mother and a Turkish/Jewish father called Albert. His name at birth was George Behar. His father, who became a naturalised British citizen after serving with the British Army in the First World War, named his son George after the King. The family lived in Holland until Albert’s death in 1936 when the thirteen-year-old George was sent to live with Albert’s sister’s family in Egypt. Another uncle in Egypt (not Albert’s sister’s husband) was a leading member of the Egyptian Communist Party and may have influenced George. Four years later, at the age of seventeen, he returned to the Netherlands and became a courier in the Dutch Resistance. He soon left for England to escape compulsory internment by the Germans, which would have been an automatic consequence of his reaching the age of eighteen. In England he changed his surname to Blake and worked variously for the Royal Navy and the security services, mostly translating captured German documents and assisting with the interrogation of German prisoners. After the war he was officially recruited by MI6.

At the end of 1945 he was sent to Germany to spy on the Soviet forces in East Germany. While there, he faced the robust counterintelligence work of the SMERSH unit led by Ivan Serov.

Blake’s performance in Germany was exceptional and he was rewarded with a career development sabbatical at Cambridge University, where he studied Russian. His tutor was an English woman whose Russian mother had lived in St Petersburg before the revolution. She had a great love of Russia, though not of Communism, and inspired her students with her lyrical patriotism. This made a considerable impression on the youthful Blake and it stirred in him something of a romantic outlook towards Russia and all things Russian.

Early in 1950 Blake was posted to the British Embassy in Seoul, Korea, entrusted with building a network of agents. He had made little progress before the outbreak of the Korean War rendered his task impossible. When Seoul was overrun by the North Korean Army, Blake was taken captive, along with two other British and four French diplomats. They were interned in a small village in North Korea, fed frugal rations and held in prison-like accommodation by their North Korean captors.

At some point they were moved from one prison site to another and, in the course of this two-day journey, they saw the devastating results of the bombing of villages and towns by the huge US Fortress aircraft. This led to extensive soul-searching on Blake’s part as to the human cost of military conflict and the legitimacy of war itself – any war.

As a concession to their status as internees rather than prisoners, the diplomats were allowed to correspond with the Soviet Embassy in Pyongyang. They protested that their captivity was unjust and a violation of international law. The Soviets countered that they were in no position to set them free, but Soviet Embassy staff sent them books, including Marx’s Das Kapital, which Blake read several times. He seems to have found it persuasive, undergoing a secret conversion to Communism as the means to achieve world peace, freedom and social justice.

As time went on – they were interned for three years – the diplomats were allowed to meet regularly and individually with Soviet Embassy officials for thirty-minute interviews. Blake’s half hour was always spent with a particular Soviet official, a colonel in the MGB. Together, they made plans for Blake’s new life as a double agent.

Following his release and triumphant return to London, Blake was granted some recuperation leave. He spent his break in Holland, where a secret meeting was arranged in The Hague with Nikolai Rodin, the MGB’s London Rezident. They agreed upon arrangements for future contacts in London. Blake was now established as a double agent.

By the time Blake met Rodin again in London – after Blake had started to work at Section Y in Carlton Gardens – it was already clear just how valuable Blake could be; so valuable that, even in the chaos in Moscow following Stalin’s death and the imprisonment of Lavrentiy Beria, the MGB sent a new man to London for the specific purpose of running Blake as a double agent.

The new man was Sergei Kondrashev, a bright thirty-year-old officer, rising rapidly through the ranks of the MGB’s counterintelligence personnel. He arrived in London in October with cover as First Secretary, Cultural Relations, to replace Rodin as the Rezident.